Alan Greenspan On The Retreat  

The Agonist has a post wondering if Mr Greenspan had some angry phone calls to field in the wake of his inconvenient bout of truth telling about Iraqi oil.

Alan Greenspan backpedals from his statement that the war was about oil:

Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

Go to the link to watch Greenspan spinning furiously backwards. Guess he got some phone calls. Iraq would not have been invaded if it didn't have oil. Here's the deal - while oil prices were still relatively low when the invasion happened, supplies were tightening. The only easily accessible cheap light sweet crude available in large amounts which wasn't already being pumped was in Iraq. The problem was that if you removed the sanctions without removing Saddam, the feeling was he'd spend the money in ways that were unacceptable. But sanctions were already cracking and so was the consensus for sanctions. So, under that view of the world, Saddam had to go.

Unfortunately for the Bush administration they were too incompetent to even get oil out of Iraq. But while certainly the war was about more than oil -- many different constituencies wanted many different things out of the war, which was one of the reasons it was prosecuted so badly -- anyone who says it had nothing to do with oil needs to answer this question: "If Iraq had no oil, would it have been invaded?"

It's very hard to argue the answer is anything but no, and thus Greenspan's original assertion is basically correct. The Iraq war was about oil. Not only about oil, but oil was a big deal -- which is why the oil ministry got protected when the US conquered Baghdad, and nothing else; including munitions depots that were prime suspects for the WMD that was the supposed causus belli, which didn't. ...

The Independent has an article by David Strachan on Lord Oxburgh's latest warning sabout oil supplies - " Oil industry 'sleepwalking into crisis'".

Lord Oxburgh, the former chairman of Shell, has issued a stark warning that the price of oil could hit $150 per barrel, with oil production peaking within the next 20 years.

He accused the industry of having its head "in the sand" about the depletion of supplies, and warned: "We may be sleepwalking into a problem which is actually going to be very serious and it may be too late to do anything about it by the time we are fully aware."

In an interview with The Independent on Sunday ahead of his address to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in Ireland this week, Lord Oxburgh, one of the most respected names in the energy industry, said a rapid increase in the price of oil was inevitable as demand continued to outstrip supply. He said: "We can probably go on extracting oil from the ground for a very long time, but it is going to get very expensive indeed.

"And once you see oil prices in excess of $100 or $150 a barrel, the alternatives simply become more attractive on price grounds if on no others."

Lord Oxburgh added that oil majors must invest more heavily in developing viable alternatives to oil and gas. "If you look at it from oil companies' point of view, effectively what they're doing at the moment is continuing business as usual, and sticking their toes in the water in a number of areas which might become important in future.

"But at present there is a relatively poor business case for making significantly greater investment in these new areas."

Commenting on whether "peak oil" – the point when global oil production goes into terminal decline – was likely to be reached in the near future, he said: "In a way it scarcely matters; what really matters is the gap between production and demand. I don't know whether there is going to be a peak in world oil production, whether it's going to plateau and then slowly come down.

"It could well plateau within the next 20 years, and I guess I would be surprised if it hadn't."

Alternet has a look at Canada's tar sands and the huge environmental cost involved in extracting oil from them.

The United States has its hopes pinned on Canada's "tar sands" for North American security in the oil market. But their "black gold" is an environmental nightmare.

It's well-known that the United States consumes more oil per capita than any other country in the world, absorbing two-thirds of global oil production. This heavy dependence has often, and aptly, been described as an addiction; even U.S. President George W. Bush trotted out the metaphor in his 2006 State of the Union address ("America is addicted to oil").

Most of us regard addictions (to anything) as inherently unhealthy and admission of the problem as the first step toward getting clean. In this case, however, U.S. policy has simply been to seek increased oil imports from more reliable sources closer to home, in effect, to replace distant and unstable dealers with one from the neighborhood -- specifically, Canada, already the kingpin dealer of oil to the United States. In 2005 Canada exported almost 1.5 million barrels per day to the United States, about 7 percent of U.S. daily consumption. Canada exports 66 percent of its domestic crude oil production, and since 1995 the United States has received 99 percent of these exports. At first glance, it would seem that Canada wouldn't be able to boost oil production to fill the gap; production of conventional light and heavy oil in Canada was predicted to peak in 2006 and then rapidly decline. But that's where Canada's "unconventional" tar sands come in.

The vast bulk of Canada's tar sands is found in the province of Alberta, the country's most prolific producer of fossil fuels. The tar sands deposits underlie more than 140,000 square kilometers of relatively pristine boreal forest, an area larger than the state of Florida. It's estimated that the tar sands hold approximately 1.7 trillion barrels of crude bitumen (the technical term for the fossil fuel extracted from the tar sands). But most of this bitumen will never be recovered and only a fraction, 174 billion barrels, is estimated to be recoverable with today's technology and under current and anticipated economic conditions. ...

Producing oil from the tar sands is scraping the bottom of the oil barrel. Tar sands consist of a mixture of 85 percent sand, clay, and silt; 5 percent water; and 10 percent crude bitumen, the tarlike substance that can be converted to oil. Bitumen doesn't flow like crude oil, and getting it out of the tar sands is a messy job. The current technology, which has evolved relatively little since it was first developed in the early 20th century, is a hot water-based separation process that requires huge quantities of water and energy (see diagram). Imagine mixing a bucket of roofing tar into a child's sandbox. Then boil some water, pour it into the sandbox, and try to wash the tar out of the sand.

Most tar sands production takes place in vast open-pit mines, some as large as 150 square kilometers and as deep as 90 meters. Before strip-mining can begin, the boreal forest must be clear-cut, rivers and streams diverted, and wetlands drained. The overburden (the soil, rocks, and clay overlying the tar sands deposit) must be stripped away and stockpiled to reach the bitumen. Four tons of material are moved to produce every barrel of bitumen.

At current production rates, with just three mines operating, enough material is moved every two days to fill a 60,000-seat stadium. But only a small fraction of the bitumen deposits is close enough to the surface to be strip-mined. Over 80 percent of the established tar sands reserves are deeper and must be extracted in situ (in place) by injecting high-pressure steam into the ground to soften the bitumen so it can be pumped to the surface.

Once separated from the sand, the bitumen is still a low-grade, heavy fossil fuel that must undergo an energy-intensive process to upgrade it into a synthetic crude oil more like conventional crude, either by adding hydrogen or removing carbon. Upgrading the bitumen usually occurs before it is shipped to refineries, but sometimes raw bitumen is diluted (e.g., with naphtha) and pipelined to a refinery where it is both upgraded and refined. In the United States about three-quarters of the oil is refined into transportation fuels.

But even then not just any refinery will do. A certain amount of reconfiguring must occur at refineries more accustomed to handling conventional crude oil. Some American refineries, primarily in the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain region, already accept some synthetic crude oil from the tar sands. But with growing reliance on this source of oil, numerous American refineries are converting or expanding in order to handle tar sands-derived synthetic crude oil or raw bitumen.

TreeHugger ahas a classic quote from Salon about Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg.

When we last mentioned climate change delayer Bjorn Lomborg after his Colbert interview, , commenters noted "Why have you labeled him a denier? He simply sounds like a pragmatist." Over at Climate Progress, Joe Romm has prepared a two-part debunking of Lomborg, first going after his comments on polar bears (Lomborg thinks they will simply follow the ice or turn into land animals) and in part 2, Lomborg's cherry picking of statistics on sea level rise. There is also a review of Lomborg's new book, Cool it, in Salon that starts with a parody, with Lomborg talking to Noah while he is building the ark:

Up walks a man who introduces himself as an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He says, "Noah, you have to stop. We've run the numbers and they don't add up. I agree that there may be a few days of rain, but if you really want to help future generations, don't build the ark. Grow the economy!"

Links:

* AP - Blackwater license being revoked in Iraq. This will be quite significant if they really do get ejected - good for both Iraq and America. But they'll probably tell the Iraqi government who really runs the show. "Monday's action against Blackwater was likely to give the unpopular government a boost, given Iraqis' dislike of the contractors. Many of the contractors have been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys, but none has faced charges or prosecution."
* AP - Iranian influence increasing in Iraq
* Haaretz - Iranian TV series follows fate of Jews in World War II
* TreeHugger - Green Guide to Houses Down Under